The Adventures of Elder Ben Jarvis, serving the the Mexico Guadalajara Mission, the second half of his mission.

Monday, August 5, 2013

Ingrown toenails, and a visit from the Wagners

The pictures were again taken from the mission blog: guadalajaramexicomission.blogspot.com

President and Sister Wagner visited the Tuxpan branch on Sunday. They put some fun pictures on there, and wrote some nice things about the branch and the work being done.

Ben, and Elder Gil from Guatamala

The chapel in Tuxpan

The Primary in Tuxpan

These young men pass out and collect the hymn books every Sunday :)

Now for Ben's letter:.......

The big news of the day is that after we write to you guys I am going to have to go to the doctor to get my ingrown toenail taken out. I have had it for a long time, but have not done anything about it, now it kinda hurts and is bleeding. We are going to make sure we find a good doctor. With my first Elder Hernandez companion, he had the same operation and everything went well. However with another elder I knew, they injected him in the wrong place, and blood was squirting everywhere and they had to do it again. As you can imagine I do not trust the medical services here, but I have got to get this taken care of.

A lot of things happened this week, and I will try to explain them all in as few words as I can to make it quicker. The zone leaders called us on Tuesday to tell us that we were going to have special transfers. What happened is that an elder who was in Tamazula, a small branch near here, had to go home early because he hurt his knees and so, Elder Hernandez was sent there to fill his place and I am now in a trio with Elder Mills, the one from South Sevier and Elder Gil, who is from Guatemala. We will likely be in a trio for 2 weeks until the next transfer, when I will hopefully train again, would be my wish. We are working in both of our areas, but many of the members are going to work with me in my area on Divisions.

Sorry I feel like I am just complaining a lot and talking too much about myself and I will try to stop doing that. It has just been a little bit of a tougher week with E. Hernandez leaving and everything, the thing is, just like I am sure you guys already know, it takes a little while to really develop a really good relationship with your companion, and we finally had so much unity, and then we had to be separated, I know that it was completely necessary, but it is not easy, and I have not been sleeping well either, but o well, I guess "if life were easy, it wouldn´t be hard."

President Wagner came to church with Sister Wagner and their daughter who came home early from her mission that she was serving in Guatemala, she came home early because she could not sleep, sound familiar?

Many priesthood holders from the area of the other elders came to church on Sunday. The Munoz family, it was frustrating this week, they did not come to church, we called them Saturday, and they said they were going to come and did not. Also, they were not there for our lesson that we had planned for Friday. We are about ready to leave Jenifer for a little while. She did not get baptized and I think that we are going to visit her less frequently for awhile.

I gained weight this week, (so that you know, I do not handle change well). I am exercising like crazy, my poor metabolism just does not know what to do, I eat like an obese person during the day, and in the morning exercise like a maniac, haha. I ran in place for 20 minutes this morning. While walking with Breeze, she is an investigator of the other elders, I had a fun time talking to her parents. Her sisters are members of the church and live in Utah, one is married to an ex missionary who served in Bolivia, they have 2 kids, one looks just like a Mexican, and the other looks totally american, pretty funny. Breeze does not want to get baptized here in Tuxpan, because she does not want to marry anyone here, she wants to get married to a missionary, after his mission. She wants to go to Utah and be baptized there. Her parents love basketball, her Dad loves to watch it and her mom loves to play it, they are fanatics. They taught me all of the basketball jargon and all of the baseball jargon that they knew, that was pretty awesome. I forgot to take my camera.

Carmen and her daughter Magda came to church yesterday, they are doing awesome, every lesson we have with them is a good one. They have a baptismal date for the 24th of August. I taught Sunday School class about the oath and covenant of the priesthood. Yared and Imelda Baltazar came to church again yesterday for the second week in a row, they are less active members who are totally awesome. They fasted yesterday and came to church even though they were out until 3 in the morning at a party they had to go to.

I had a fun experience reading the scriptures this week. I read 2 Ne 7, one of the Isaiah chapters and was just frustrated, did not understand hardly anything and just kinda read it to get through it, then when I read chapter 8, I decided that I was really going to study it and try to understand it, I prayed a lot for that understanding and received it, and it was really fun. Juan Manuel came to church again and bore his testimony and his mom made us tamales this week. Hno. Castolo accompanied me on Saturday to teach a couple of members and we taught 2 of them about the Priesthood and then later in the day he had the opportunity to give a blessing to his granddaughter, he was so happy while accompanying me and it was fun to see, and the best part was that he totally talked me up in his testimony in front of Pres. Wagner, haha.

I will try to bring my camera next week. I felt a little guilty this week because both of the zone leaders came to do divisions with us and it was kinda frustrating. They got here and did not study language just chatted for a long time in English. Then, I had to do divisions with an Elder that is probably the only one in the mission that I really have a hard time getting along with, and things were great, until, after we taught a lesson, and during the lesson, he kept saying, Josefina, like you would say it in English, and after the lesson I told him how to say her name, and he promptly told me in a very condescending way, "Elder, you worry way too much about your spanish," and sadly I reacted and then, he said, I am just trying to teach you and ya, and I said, I just cannot learn like that, and eventually we got over it, but it was tough for a little bit. We are still excited here, 43 people came to church, and so less than the week before, but much more men came to church and so were were really happy about that.

I guess some of the best things about this week was that fasting was awesome, it isn't even hard to fast anymore and I love doing it. It is so much easier to do it for a specific purpose, I also shared a brief testimony and felt like my spanish was alright this week. Our mission leader is also coming to church again and went with me to teach a lesson this week and is really excited.

We ate some good food this week as well, on Saturday, I ate 15 tacos, with 30 tortillas, but they are smaller.

This dog was across the street from the church, keeping an eye on things.